Articul8, the enterprise AI startup Intel spun out in early 2024, is now halfway through a hefty new funding round that puts it squarely in unicorn-in-waiting territory.
The Santa Clara–based company has secured more than half of a planned $70 million Series B at a $500 million pre-money valuation, CEO and founder Arun K. Subramaniyan said in an interview. The round is being raised in two tranches, with the first led by Madrid-based Adara Ventures. Articul8 expects to close the full Series B in the first quarter of 2026.
That price tag represents a roughly 5x jump from the startup’s $100 million post‑money valuation at its Series A in January 2024. In the 12 months since, Articul8 says it has crossed $90 million in total contract value across 29 paying customers, including Hitachi Energy, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Franklin Templeton and Intel.
Subramaniyan stressed that the company didn’t head back to market out of necessity. After landing several large enterprise deals, Articul8 is revenue-positive. “We are not cash-strapped,” he said, framing the raise as an acceleration play rather than a survival move.
For the current fiscal year, Articul8 expects to finish with annual recurring revenue just over $57 million, according to Subramaniyan, with roughly 45% to 50% of that already recognized.
Betting on specialized, in-house AI
Articul8’s pitch runs directly against the grain of the generic, cloud-hosted large language model trend. Instead of pushing customers to share infrastructure and models, the company builds specialized AI systems that run inside a customer’s own IT environment.
Rather than selling raw models, Articul8 packages its technology as software applications and AI agents tuned for specific business functions. Its focus is tightly aligned with heavily regulated sectors — energy, manufacturing, aerospace, financial services and semiconductors — where accuracy, auditability and strict data control are non‑negotiable.
“Our competition is pretty much everybody,” Subramaniyan said, but he pointed to hyperscale cloud providers as the main rivals. Those general-purpose AI offerings, he argued, have become commodities, while Articul8 is betting that customers in regulated industries will pay for predictable outcomes and clear audit trails that are harder to guarantee on shared cloud platforms.
The strategy appears designed to tap into CIO anxiety about handing sensitive data to broad, opaque models. By keeping systems on-prem or in tightly controlled environments, Articul8 is trying to position itself as a safer on‑ramp to generative AI for risk‑averse enterprises.
Intel roots, global ambitions
Articul8 was carved out of Intel in early 2024 and still leans heavily on deep infrastructure and chip‑level expertise. The company works with major tech players including Nvidia and Google Cloud, while AWS shows up on both sides of the ledger — as a customer and as a deployment partner on some projects.
Headcount currently sits at 75 employees, with about 80% of them in research and development. Teams are distributed across the United States, Brazil and India.
The fresh capital is earmarked mainly for expanding R&D and product development and for scaling Articul8’s international footprint. Europe and parts of Asia are top priorities.
Adara Ventures’ involvement is central to that plan. The firm’s energy fund is backed by the European Investment Fund, which Subramaniyan says should help Articul8 move faster across European markets where energy and industrial players face strict regulatory regimes.
Beyond Europe, Articul8 is pushing deeper into Asia. The company has already started working with large enterprises in Japan and South Korea, and India’s Aditya Birla Ventures has joined the ongoing Series B, underscoring its ambitions in the Indian market as well.
With rising revenue, a growing list of marquee customers and a valuation that has quintupled in a year, Articul8 is emerging as one of the clearest bets in the race to build AI that highly regulated industries can actually trust — and audit.
